The future of GNOME - an interesting subject. GNOME 3 has been out and about for a while, and it hasn't exactly been a smashing success. One of the efforts to take GNOME to the next level is what the team refers to as GNOME OS - but in reality, it's a set of improvements to GNOME that are just as interesting to GNOME-the-desktop-environment.

I am sure that Red Hat is not very content with GNOME Shell and its marketing and production team have been measuring the decline of Fedora popularity since the adoption of this new version.

Someone has just introduced MATE as another option upon installation and it may very well be that the Red Hat developers turn towards MATE. They know the code, and they can sponsor this. This will boom when GNOME shouts its independence as a their own distribution, and it's the end for them.

It would be very timing to hear what Red Hat has to say about the future of RHEL 7, although this doesn't affect directly their market, it has been a huge impact on their testbed distro, and I am sure they are not pleased.